If cloud providers want to compete with market leader Amazon Web Services, the battle could come down to having every major feature that Amazon does.

Today, Microsoft announced a preview for a fully managed NoSQL document database, which eschews traditional commands in the SQL query language, as well as a managed search tool developers can weave into their applications, based in the Azure public cloud. The tools should add diversity to Microsoft’s growing public cloud offerings and bring it a couple of steps closer to Amazon’s cloud — just as Microsoft has been keeping up with Amazon on prices.

And that’s the real news here: Price isn’t Microsoft’s only big attack vector against Amazon. Cloud features are becoming a higher priority.

Microsoft is a long-time player in relational databases, particularly with SQL Server software, and it already has the SQL Database cloud service available. But it didn’t have a document database that would be analogous to Amazon’s DynamoDB database service or its CloudSearch searching service.